SILAS: You're right, mother. It had to be that way. But now that we buy our soap—we don't want to say what soap-making made us.
GRANDMOTHER: We're honest.
SILAS: Yes. In a way. But there's another kind o' honesty, seems to me, goes with that more seein' kind of kindness. Our honesty with the Indians was little to brag on.
GRANDMOTHER: You fret more about the Indians than anybody else does.
SILAS: To look out at that hill sometimes makes me ashamed.
GRANDMOTHER: Land sakes, you didn't do it. It was the government. And what a government does is nothing for a person to be ashamed of.
SILAS: I don't know about that. Why is he here? Why is Felix Fejevary not rich and grand in Hungary to-day? 'Cause he was ashamed of what his government was.
GRANDMOTHER: Well, that was a foreign government.
SILAS: A seeing how 'tis for the other person—a bein' that other person, kind of honesty. Joke of it, 'twould do something for you. 'Twould 'a' done something for us to have been Indians a little more. My father used to talk about Blackhawk—they was friends. I saw Blackhawk once—when I was a boy. (to FEJEVARY) Guess I told you. You know what he looked like? He looked like the great of the earth. Noble. Noble like the forests—and the Mississippi—and the stars. His face was long and thin and you could see the bones, and the bones were beautiful. Looked like something that's never been caught. He was something many nights in his canoe had made him. Sometimes I feel that the land itself has got a mind that the land would rather have had the Indians.
GRANDMOTHER: Well, don't let folks hear you say it. They'd think you was plum crazy.